Home, James...

Phil Hogan tours Joyce's Dublin ahead of this week's Bloomsday festival to celebrate the author's drunken, bawdy masterpiece, Ulysses. And along the way Joyce's nephew tells him that Ewan McGregor was a little short for the film role of the 6ft writer

More has been written about James Joyce's masterpiece Ulysses than any other literary work, though I think it's safe to say that hardly anyone has actually read it - in fact, according to my exhaustive research in the office, it seems to boil down to just me and a few other advanced people. Luckily, none of this has stopped millions of visitors turning up in Dublin every year to celebrate 'Bloomsday', held on 16 June - the day on which, in 1904, all the action in Ulysses takes place - and named after Leopold Bloom, one of the book's two main protagonists. The other is Stephen Dedalus, an undisguised Joyce in his early twenties.

During the course of the novel, the pair each make their separate odysseys through the city, getting into minor social scrapes, the middle-aged Bloom musing on lunch, sex and unsavoury bodily functions, the young Stephen thinking about 'the ineluctable modality of the visible' (don't ask me) and other impenetrable bardic matters.

Really, that's all you need to know to have a good Bloomsday, which in recent years has turned into a week-long festival of dressing-up, tours, performances and readings at various sites around Dublin germane to the plot, though mostly it's about zig-zagging fearlessly in the footsteps of our heroes, drinking Guinness, behaving indecorously and staying up too late.

I am here ahead of the official revels to carry out my own important scholarly studies, accompanied by my old chum Jon, who was best man at my wedding and has selflessly agreed to come along and make sure I've got the map the right way up.

Any aficionado's first stop has to be the Martello watchtower out in Sandycove, where Joyce was an unpaying guest. It features in the opening scene of the book in which Stephen is watching 'stately, plump Buck Mulligan' having a shave on the roof. The tower now houses the James Joyce Museum, and attracts visitors from all over the world (Jamie Lee Curtis dropped by the other week), so needless to say our taxi driver has to radio the office to see if anyone has heard of it.

But when we get there it's interesting to see Joyce's guitar and his walking stick and his death mask, and the circular gunrest up the narrow spiral stone staircase with its view of Joyce's 'snotgreen' sea, though it doesn't look particularly green today. But I would defy anyone remotely 'plump' to get up these steps, and indeed it turns out that Oliver Gogarty - the real-life model for Buck Mulligan - was a person of unexceptional girthly dimensions in addition to being a minor poet, surgeon, self-styled wit, weekend aviator and the man who was paying the rent.

We must infer that the reason Joyce made Buck fatter and more unpleasant was because Gogarty fired a gun over his guest's head when he was asleep, which in those days was the way to ask someone to leave. Confusingly, in Ulysses it's somebody else who fires the gun (read entire book for full details). Suffice to say, Joyce left the tower as soon as he could get his trousers on.

Afterwards we take the Dart railway back into town. It's chucking it down now as we struggle across the O'Connell bridge, too preoccupied with having our eyes poked out by people's umbrellas to stand gawping at the spot where Bloom stopped to throw cake crumbs to the seagulls over the Liffey. We nip into the first pub we can find that boasts a completely barking, white-bearded toothless drunk, who keeps Jon busy with the manifold evils of grasping, bloodsucking women, while I peruse my dog-eared copy of Ulysses (well, dog-eared at the beginning, where I restarted it a million times in 1985). 'Are you an engineer?' our new friend suddenly demands, for reasons best known to his social worker. We make our polite escape to the next watering hole (next door, as it happens), where we eat a hearty Irish stew and have a couple of drinks to prepare us for the literary pub crawl due to start upstairs at the Duke, in Duke Street, at 7.30pm.

The sun comes out. Hurray! But then it starts raining again. The tour kicks off with a few auld ballads and an amusing extract from Waiting for Godot performed by a pair of robust actorly types, whose repertoire teems with jokes, stories and readings from Yeats, Oscar Wilde and the like, as we wind in and out of O'Neill's and the Old Stand, back to the Duke and, finally, to Davy Byrne's, a 'moral pub', where Bloom enjoyed a mustardy gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of Burgundy before going off to buy a lewd book.

We have just time to pop into a further 18 establishments around the riotous Temple Bar area before accidentally managing to find our hotel, by now so much cerebrally stimulated that we hardly notice that the rain has stopped.

Next morning we're up early and as eager as you like to spend half the morning at the Writers' Museum with a full- lard fried eggs and black pudding breakfast churning about inside us, though it does take us a while to find the place with our eyes closed and every hammer drill in Dublin thudding through the city (to commemorate our visit, the council has decided to replace all the roads and pavements at the same time). But soon we are wandering around the hushed Georgian rooms with our audio-guides plugged in, leaning reverently forward to inspect the multifarious first editions, forewords, frontispieces and sundry programmes and playbills and pens and pipes, plus Samuel Beckett's typewriter and telephone, which has a red button on it that he could press to stop incoming calls when he wasn't feeling talkative, or perhaps just had a hangover, which is understandable.

There's not much here about Joyce (who of course has a museum to himself), though I do find out that even at the age of 18 he was busy startling influential people with the ripeness of his mind. Ibsen sent him a gushing letter after Joyce had reviewed one of his plays. By the time Ulysses was published in 1922 he had the literary world at his feet peeling him grapes. Eliot agreed it was a masterpiece; Hemingway was an admirer; Faulkner was too awestruck even to speak to him; F. Scott Fitzgerald offered to jump out of the window to demonstrate his veneration (Joyce said it wouldn't be necessary). Only Virginia Woolf said the book was shite (or something like that). We have a half-hour cavity in our busy itinerary, but we find a brilliant corner newsagent's called the Candy Shop, where Jon gets a souvenir Ha'penny Bridge snowstorm for his girlfriend, and I buy a packet of tissues. We spend 20 minutes looking in the window, because it's not everywhere you can buy the Mirror, a large sliced loaf, a Russian army helmet, a leprechaun alarm clock, a 1962 hurling programme, a pocket-sized Life and Times of John F. Kennedy , a snooker cue, a Nottingham Forest scarf and a set of Singaporean stamps without moving from the counter. Obviously the Candy Shop sells Mars bars as well, but as favourite shops go, this one just about pips the one round the corner from our hotel called Why Go Bald!, which has a massive neon sign depicting a smiling man with his hair flashing on and off.

We traipse down to the James Joyce Centre on North Great George's Street, which is preparing for Bloomsday. Here we meet Ken, a grand, tousled white-haired gent who shows us round, telling us stories about Joyce's father who drank away the family fortune, and of Nora Barnacle who eloped with Joyce to Paris on 16 June 1904 (hence the significance of that date). Ken is slightly anxious about the likely success of a new Bloomsday event based on the Nighttown brothel scene, which according to the blurb will be a 'hallucinatory pageant recreating the dementia of the drunken experience of reeling through Edwardian Dublin's red light district', though it sounds like a hit to me.

I'm a bit slow to spot the clues during all this, but it turns out that James Joyce was Ken's uncle! How cool is that? Though, obviously, it was probably less cool when Ken was growing up in the Thirties and Forties and Joyce's name was Beelzebub in polite Dublin circles. I ask if he's seen Nora , the film about Nora Barnacle. He says it was quite good, though he was a bit alarmed when Ewan McGregor turned up before shooting to research the part. 'Very nice chap,' he says, 'but Joyce was a six-footer and Ewan McGregor is...'

'Short?'

'Well, yes, though they did make him look taller.'

The Joyce Centre is not a museum, but there's a library where anyone can come and browse or carry out research, and a bookshop. The door from 7 Eccles Street is here (Bloom's address in the novel - the actual house was demolished); on the top floor is a gallery depicting the real-life Dubliners who appeared in Joyce's fiction under different names; then there's Joyce's furniture from his apartment in Paris; photographs of Joyce and family and his contemporaries.

Ken is very good value, reciting passages from Ulysses and the truly bonkers Finnegan's Wake as we go along, obliging me to scrape the barrel of my memory to show I've been paying attention. 'Ah, that's in... er... what is it, isn't it? "Lestry gonians"? No, wait, the other one,' I say, starting to sound like one of Joyce's least punctuated interior monologues. It can be a difficult book, I say. Ken tells us even Matisse hadn't read it, and he was supposed to be doing the illustrations. 'He assumed it was a version of Homer's Odyssey ,' he says. Which apparently explains why everyone is wearing Grecian sandals.

Jon intervenes with the theory that Ezra Pound went to the same barber as Brendan Behan, or at least one with a very similar sense of humour.

Ken hands us over to his colleague, Lynn, who lends us a green umbrella and takes us for a walk through north inner-city Dublin, where the declining fortunes of the Joyce family were marked by a rapid succession of 14 different addresses, each less wholesome than the one before it. The last and therefore worst was in Fontenoy Street, a two-bedroom single-storey house. Obviously, they've done it up a bit now - and you have to think of it with a family of 11 living there - but I can't help wondering what the present occupiers think about us standing outside their living-room window discussing their house as an example of Edwardian urban squalor. Lynn assures us they don't mind.

Anyway, it was here that Joyce wrote the filthy letters to Nora. I don't know about the filthy letters, so she reads one out. It is quite filthy. 'And there are filthier ones than this,' she says. We go to Eccles Street and look at the hospital that used to be number seven. Here we have to imagine Bloom coming out, crossing to the sunny side ('avoiding the loose cellarflap of Number 75') and up to the corner to buy some offal for breakfast. We hear the famous extract about Bloom liking 'the inner organs of beasts', especially 'grilled mutton kidneys, which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine'. Yum.

Entirely by chance we get back to the hotel in time for a short nap and the afternoon highlights of England v Brazil, before heading out to research some more pubs with Joycean credentials. We go to the ancient Brazen Head (where Ulysses promises 'a decent enough do') and the Ormond, where the 'Sirens' chapter was set ('best value in Dublin') and end up propping up the Octagon Bar at the Clarence, an elegant hotel part-owned by U2's Bono, and a hip designer retreat from the 'colourful' slappers'n'lads scene of Temple Bar.

To be honest, it's not until afterwards that I find the Clarence is even mentioned in Ulysses . Maybe they're all in there somewhere. As Bloom says: 'Good puzzle would be cross Dublin without passing a pub'. On the other hand Bloom is not much of a drinker. As every schoolboy knows, 'he never drank no manner of mead which he then put by and anon and full privily he voided the more part in his neighbour's glass and his neighbour nist not of his wile'.

Whatever that means...

Festival diary

Tomorrow until Thursday City walking tours following Ulysses, 2pm, James Joyce Centre. Price IR£6. (£4.80). Introductory talks on Joyce, Ulysses and Bloomsday, at Joyce Centre and city libraries. Various times. Free. Tours of National Library, Kildare Street, with emphasis on Joyce. Various times. Free.

Wednesday Do You Hear What I'm Seeing, a one-man show by Senator David Norris about Joyce's life and works. Gresham Hotel, O'Connell Street, 8pm. Tickets IR£10 (£8).